From the Permanent CollectionThe "Sphinx of Delft": Rediscovering Vermeer at The Frick Collection

In mid-December 1675, Johannes Vermeer,
painter and art dealer in the city of Delft,
died. A year and a half later, Catharina
Bolnes, his widow and the mother of their
eleven children, petitioned for bankruptcy
to the High Court of Holland and West
Friesland. She asserted that her husband not
only had been unable to sell any of his own art
during the “ruinous and protracted war” — a
reference to the French invasion of the Dutch
Republic in 1672 — but, to his great financial
detriment, he had been “left sitting with the
paintings of other masters that he was dealing
in.” Vermeer had been without funds of
his own and because of the “very great burden”
of their many children, at least eight of
whom were still underage, he had lapsed into “such decay and decadence,” according to his
wife, and had taken his personal troubles “so
to heart,” that “he had fallen into a frenzy,
[and] in a day and a half he had gone from
being healthy to being dead.”

A plausible interpretation of Catharina
Bolnes’s sad testimony — as one prominent Vermeer scholar, John Michael Montias, has
suggested — is that the artist, panic-stricken
over his inability to pay his mounting debts
and support his large family, suffered a heart
attack or a stroke from which he soon died.
The burial of Vermeer, on December 15, 1675,
is recorded in the register of Delft’s Oude
Kerk (Old Church). He was only forty-three
years old.